Assessment

Resubmit or resit failed elements and/or make good any missing element

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this module, students should be able to:

1. Describe and appraise the main chracteristics of the Victorian and modern ghost story, both as an identifiable literary genre and as a varied tradition (from the mid-C19th to the early C20th).

2. Consider and evaluate the arguments put forward by Victorian and modern writers about the definition of the ghost story: its narrative techniques, its literary conventions, its creative possibilities

3. Engage with theoretical and critical debates on the uncanny and the ghostly as problems of historical, cultural and literary interpretation

4. Write about the subject in a well-structured and argued manner.

Brief description

Haunting Texts will introduce students to the ghost story as a distinct literary genre, one that emerges in the early nineteenth century and becomes a dominant literary form in Britain from around 1850 until the First World War. The emergence of the ghost story will be linked to specific historical conditions in the Victorian era - an expanding readership, magazine publication, scientific developments, the cultural displacement of religious tradition - and also to a corresponding set of debates amongst Victorian intellectuals and writers about the supernatural and its literary treatment. The module begins by exploring theoretical reflections on the supernatural in the late Gothic tradition exemplified by Radcliffe and Scott, before moving on to the Victorian ghost story proper (Le Fanu, Dickens, Collins, Edwards, Lee). The reading for each week includes critical and theoretical commentaries, allowing students to focus on various aspects of the ghost story - vision, gender, location, fantasy, the uncanny, colonialism. The transition from the Victorian to the modern ghost story is traced in the work of M. R. James, whose texts dramatize the encounter of academic culture with the uncanny; students will read this text together with a viewing of Jonathon Miller's 1976 television adaptation, allowing them to consider the narrative problems and possibilities involved in transferring a ghost story from page to screen. And another James - this time Henry ? will be seen to make the apparition in 'The Jolly Corner' into a self-reflexive question of writing itself. A terrifying story by May Sinclair will next be explored in terms of its intertextual dimension. Ghost stories from the 20th century will be read alongside theoretical reflections on the uncanny dimension of modernity and colonialism, leading to an exploration of the ghostly dimension of theory itself, especially as manifested in psychoanalysis.

Aims

This module combines close textual analysis, intellectual history and litrary theory, covering a range of authors largely excluded from the existing syllabus for 19th century core modules. Likely to be interesting to Psychology & English (Joint Honours students).